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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

In the Anthropic Mythos model cards they explicitly remarked that they didn't want Mythos to be specifically good at security. They trained it to be good at coding, and as a side effect the model is (obviously) good at security. This what happens with flesh hackers too, mostly. Hackers are very good programmers, as a side effect they understand systems well enough that their understanding has security implications.

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Model cards are just marketing material. I wouldn’t trust them one bit.

But they are treated as holy scripture ...

The whole discussion started out as an attempt to disprove/verify anthropics (model card) claims.

He also transfers the logic of their claims to the actual real world. You can say that model cards are marketing garbage. You have to prove that experienced programmers are not significantly better at security.

> You have to prove that experienced programmers are not significantly better at security.

That has not been my experience. It's true that they are "better at security" in the sense that they know to avoid common security pitfalls like unparamaterized SQL, but essentially none of them have the ability to apply their knowledge to identify vulnerabilities in arbitrary systems.

> essentially none of them have the ability to apply their knowledge to identify vulnerabilities in arbitrary systems.

I've found it to be the opposite. Many of them do have the ability to apply their knowledge in that fashion. They're just either not incentivised to do so, or incentivised to not do so.

An expert level human doesn't have to be expert at every programming category. A webdev wouldn't spot a use after free. A systems engineer wouldn't know about CSRF. That is if both don't research security beyond their field. Requiring a programmer to apply their knowledge to an arbitrary system is asking too much. On the other hand and LLM can be expert level in every programming field, able to spot and combine vulnerabilities creatively. That is all pretty hard and I don't think an security expert with vast knowledge would say "that's easy".

My point is that more experienced programmers are better at security on average, not that they are security experts.

I would think pwn2own competitions would signal the opposite. I'm consistently and often amazed at how a unique combination of exploits can bring a larger exploit and often in ways that most wouldn't even consider. I think it takes a level of knowledge, experience, creativity and paranoia to be really good with security issues all around as a person.

And overfitting benchmarks can easily be gamed. Yet here we are with the top HN comment on the HN Mythos thread outlining it's benchmarking performance gains.

I guess we'll never learn.

You don't need to trust anyone. GPT 5.4 xhigh is available and you can test it for $20, to verify it is actually able to find complex bugs in old codebases. Do the work instead of denying AI can do certain things. It's a matter of an afternoon. Or, trust the people that did this work. See my YouTube video where I find tons of Redis bugs with GPT 5.4.

I did not claim or deny anything. You cited the model card, I just pointed out that this is no reliable source. If you have better sources, like your YT video, you should cite those instead.

You are claiming something: that the model card is not reliable, therefore it's as useful as nothing. Sowing doubt without a possible solution adds little value to the conversation. Moreover, your rebuttal is unsubstantiated.

Guys, think about all the security vulnerabilities you're aware of; now, think about how many of those you know how to technically reproduce. Now imagine that you actually don't know how to reproduce most things and you're never actually be able to judge the result.

Well, just cause these are all AI people doesn't mean they verified enough of the output of these models to actually provide the significant security implications they're advertising.

> Hackers are very good programmers

This does not match my experience.

The missing part of their intended meaning is "skilled hackers". Unskilled hackers are everywhere, and they're bad at programming, but so are unskilled programmers.

>>> the model is (obviously) good at security

Out of curiosity, are you one of the people who has access to the model? If yes, could you write about your experimental setup in more detail?

Yep. Some are while others are more or less forum leeching and exploiting known risks and use tools.

But the some that really find certain bugs are really exceptional. Almost all are very hardware prolific and do assembler stuff. This alone is an impressive feast, I still enjoy 6510 and M68000 assembler here and there as a former scener who mainly coded demos and here and there improved games (so called trainers) or cracked few.

To be honest, the assembler guys scare me always because with it you can poke a whole in almost anything. No one in his sane mind uses assembler on x86 for professional development besides few special cases. But Python etc serve many MB of executable code for the abstraction and 20 bytes just kills it…

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